Brilliant … a still from Burning by Lee Chang-dong.
Photograph: Cannes Film Festival

This year’s Cannes festival snapped into shape in its second week. There had been rumours that this was because a few sexy contenders from Netflix had been scheduled close to the first weekend, which had to be pulled because of the streaming giant’s dispute with Cannes, and so some rather more sombre world-cinema offerings had to be slotted in, and the order shuffled.

Does Lars von Trier’s ‘vomitive’ new film spell the end for provocative cinema?

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In the first week, however, Pawel Pawłikowski’s Cold War was a stunning period drama, set in 1950s Poland, an utterly absorbing tragedy-romance in which the director takes incidental aim at the chauvinism and racism of his homeland – very relevant in 2018. The second half then offered a couple of sensationally good films. The first was Matteo Garrone’s bizarre Dogman, a drama, based on a true story, about a small-time gangster and his cringing bully-victim, a dog-groomer. The second was Lee Chang-dong’s Burning, based on the Haruki Murakami short story, an ambiguous mystery thriller about male obsession. Connoisseur taste in Cannes is favouring the undoubtedly brilliant Burning, though I was even more impressed with Dogman.

My favourite film in competition this year, which looks bound for the Palme d’Or, is Alice Rohrbacher’s sublime and mysterious magic-realist fable Happy as Lazzaro, a parable of how the rural population of Italy has been exploited and betrayed.

Nothing is more tiresome than people airily dismissing positive discrimination, smirking at the very idea while assenting to the rigid gender quotas of “best actor”, “best actress” etc. In any case, Time’s Up campaigners are not asking for positive discrimination but an end to deep-seated, subconscious negative discrimination.

This will take time. This year, the festival welcomed, with an out-of-competition slot, that talented but cynical serial prankster Lars von Trier, and his giggling gorefest The House That Jack Built, which trolled his critics with misogynist slayings and deadpan Nazi references. This film could have appeared in Cannes at any time in the past 20 years.

There was no obvious sign of a change in the culture there, nor in David Robert Mitchell’s deeply disappointing LA mystery noir Under the Silver Lake. (Like The House That Jack Built, this was a film that slavered over the naked body of Riley Keough, an excellent performer who was badly and boringly directed in both films.)

So here are my awards predictions. There is a convention that the jury does not “double up” with prizes: that is, give more than one prize to the same film. That rule was broken last year and I have broken it here. I have also offered imaginary prizes in categories that the Cannes jury does not address: cinematography, production design, music, best supporting male and female actor.